Flickr and Explorer Bar Expand in Image Search

Building on our initial announcement of Flickr’s integration into Yahoo! Image Search earlier this summer, we’ve now expanded the integration to the countries, regions and languages listed below. You can now access many Flickr images when doing your Yahoo! Image Search from the following countries:

With this launch, Flickr metadata like title, tags and comments can be used to surface Flickr results on Yahoo! Image Search results pages, making many of the millions of photographs from the Flickr community available to Yahoo! Image Search users. For example, type in ‘Tower Bridge‘ and the ranking algorithm looks at metadata from the images and determines the rank order for the results.

Of course, these are photos marked public by Flickr users; we’re not showing photos marked as private.

With this expanded integration, users can further discover and explore the world of images. Here’s a snapshot of Flickr images surfacing on the Yahoo! Image Search results page for ‘Tower Bridge’:

In addition to the internationally expanded Flickr/ Yahoo! Image Search integration, we’ve rolled out a new feature called Explorer Bar to enhance the Yahoo! Image Search experience. We introduced the Explorer Bar for searchers who want to discover more by looking at what other users are searching for. Today we have it for entertainment and location-related content, and we plan to expand to other categories in the future.

For example if you search for ‘Harry Potter‘, you find images of him as well as an Explorer Bar showing you a preview of images of other characters you might want to search for.

The same goes for cities. If you’re planning a trip to ‘London‘ and would like to check out some pictures, the Explorer Bar also shows you other interesting places that might strike your fancy.

So the next time you’re looking for an image, check out the new features on Yahoo! Image Search and let us know what you think!